At a recent vendor conference, VMWare was crying that they are getting beat by Amazon AWS, and they can’t believe it — they are getting beat by a company that sells books! That’s how I thought of Amazon, say, in 2001. No wonder VMWare is getting whupped.

“If nothing else, I think it’s a matter of cost. VMware has high licensing costs. It has no multi-tenant infrastructure of its own to drive down the costs for end customers. That’s opposed to AWS, which makes its money by doing business at scale, which gives it the ability to lower its pricing and correlating margins….Further, this is about choice. VMware does not have the depth of services that AWS offers. So then, how can VMware justify its high prices?”

I agree. I’ve been using Amazon AWS for 3 years for personal use, training, testing, development of prototypes. All on a credit card for nominal hourly rates. There are some concerns I have about Amazon AWS conforming to HIPAA and PCI (credit card) security requirements, but I understand they have these issues resolved now https://aws.amazon.com/security/